


reconciliation

by hamiltrashed



Series: You & Your Words [2]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: A track I will be forever sad did not make it into the actual show, Alex is a fucking idiot, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Because what else do I write about, Breaking Up & Making Up, Everyone's just an absolute moron, Features lyrics from Congratulations, Idiots in Love, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Oral Sex, Politics, Post-Break Up, This is really just my version of the Reynolds Pamphlet sans the affair and the Reynolds, Thomas is a fucking idiot, on the part of Thomas, on the part of society
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2019-12-15
Packaged: 2021-02-25 05:27:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21810820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hamiltrashed/pseuds/hamiltrashed
Summary: It’s been a year since Alex burned his relationship to the ground and himself along with it. He’s pretty sure too much time has passed to fix it and he's tried his best to stay away for good. But when has staying away from Thomas ever really been possible?
Relationships: Alexander Hamilton/Thomas Jefferson
Series: You & Your Words [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1037834
Comments: 16
Kudos: 113





	reconciliation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [notquiteflying](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notquiteflying/gifts).



> Well, here I am folks. It's been over a year and a half and I'm certain it's been assumed that I am dead, but rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. Mostly. Work has taken over my life since I graduated school last year, I'm always exhausted, and I never have time to write anymore. When I do, only hot, steaming shit comes out for the most part. I also had one of my Hamilton works plagiarized and turned into a Drarry fic more than two years ago, and only found out when one of you lovelies commented to let me know back in April of this year. It hurt me a lot and made me fear writing in a strange way. Needless to say, I'm a little gun-shy and feeling some feelings about returning to posting. But hey, I'm trying! This is the first thing I've finished in long time, and I'm desperate to come back to writing more. Somebody hold me to this, I beg you! I miss you all something awful.
> 
> This is the second letter in my alphabetical series, and I'm absurdly glad to have finally finished it. It's much more serious than the first one, but my desire for a retelling of the Reynolds Pamphlet (but make it gay) outweighed my desire to maintain any kind of thematic element through these fics. They're all one-shots anyway, so! [Kanye shrug] I've almost finished up the fic for the letter 'i' as well, so we shall see what comes next! This is unbeta'd but I think it's halfway decent, so I'm putting it up before I can back down out of fear that it sucks and I have lost my touch.
> 
> The love is real, friends! See you again soon. xoxo
> 
> Dedicated and gifted to **notquiteflying** , because I owe them a great deal for looking out for my beloved fics and telling me when someone had the gall to rip me off and steal my work. I appreciate you beyond what I can say here or what one little gift-fic can express! Thank you thank you thank you.

**_reconciliation_ **

**_[rekənˌsilēˈāSH(ə)n] noun_ **

**_the act of restoring harmonious relations_ **

_press myself into your skin_

_my tongue bit in your teeth_

_familiar machine_

_takes over when i need somebody_

_i lose myself in you ‘til i’m not myself with you_

_\- vérité_

Alex’s hand aches, skin splitting and oozing blood the more he white-knuckles the curved handle of the umbrella. Old, mustard yellow, battered, and with a sizeable hole that always seems to be just above Alex’s head no matter how he turns or holds it, the umbrella does little to keep him dry in this not-quite-a-downpour, not-quite-a-drizzle. He’d replace it if it didn’t feel like such a good metaphor for the current state of affairs. He glances up at the sign perched at the end of the avenue, the same sign it’s always been, as if it will read something different and tell him he’s somewhere else. But no, he’s here, on this sidewalk, in that irritatingly pretty moment when the sky spills orange into blue and everything goes hazy, with the summer showers painting his clothes too tight and his hand smarting with the phantom imprint of another man’s face.

Alex allows himself one sigh, a single shaky exhale, before he crosses the avenue and climbs the steps. The little button for the correct buzzer depresses too easily under his finger; he wants it to show some resistance, to not be so inviting, to remind him that he _should be_ somewhere else. Anywhere else. 

A voice crackles from the speaker as Alex looks upward, blinks into the camera. “Oh,” the voice says. “It’s you.” There’s a soft buzzing sound and Alex pushes the door open, yanks the umbrella closed, crosses the threshold. He forces himself not to look back, lest he be pulled away. Away in the rain or worse, in the moment where he has to come to terms with how he became this man, the one who fist-fights dirty in dirty bars and then comes to an ex-lover for comfort as if that will somehow cleanse him. 

Alex’s feet carry him over a familiar, well-worn path up the stairs, to a door at the very end of the second-floor hallway. He hesitates for just a moment, fingers twitching in an involuntary gesture of slipping a key he no longer has into a lock that would no longer fit it, before he closes his bleeding fist and raps his knuckles against the door. He wonders if he’ll leave just a speck of his DNA behind; surely, there’s nothing left of it beyond this point. 

The time between his knock and the door opening seems infinite, but when it does open, it opens quickly, nothing like the creaking way it used to creep back on its hinges when Alex would sneak inside at night after late hours at work, steal down the hall and crawl into the bed. As always, Thomas cuts an imposing figure in the doorway, tall, lithe, and Alex thinks it would be impolite _not_ to look him up and down. 

“You look good,” he says, because it’s true, and because that’s what they say in the movies.   
  
“You don’t,” Thomas replies, because it’s true, and because that’s what they say in real life. He steps aside to let Alex pass into the apartment, and Alex scans briefly for any traces of his own influence. It’s stupid to think there would be any. It’s been a year. The only thing here that says Alexander Hamilton literally says _Alexander Hamilton_ , and it’s his book, the binding shining golden, crammed in among all the others on the living room shelf. Still, Alex thinks, that’s something, because inside the front cover, Alex knows there to be a handwritten dedication _to my Thomas_. Only now does he recognize what a shame it was he tried to claim what never could belong to anyone. 

Alex turns to face Thomas when the door shuts and the lock slides home. He bites his lip hard, feels it begin to swell between his teeth, and allows himself another sigh before he admits, “I don’t know why I came here. I just needed…”

He waves his bleeding hand a little awkwardly, and Thomas narrows his eyes. “Someone to kiss your boo-boo?” It’s a little too savage, and Thomas knows it before Alex winces, because he softens just a little when he adds, “You can’t clean your own wounds?”

Alex frowns and decides that perhaps it would be better if he collected the gold star he knows deep down he came for and went on his way. Because above all, that’s why he’s here, isn’t it? To tell Thomas why he punched somebody, to be given Thomas’s approval on how he’s bleeding for the sake of honor neither of them have. Still, Alex knows how it irks Thomas to be spoken ill of, and there Alex was defending him, and here Alex is now, waiting for… what? Two pats on the head and a “good boy”? God, he’s lost the plot.

“I just needed,” Alex begins again, and without knowing how or why, he changes course. “I just needed you to help me get my head on straight.”

“Patron saint of a lost cause, am I?” Thomas asks, because he’s always been able to see right through Alex.

“You always knew how to love me tough when I needed it,” Alex tells him. “You talk sense even when I don’t want to admit it. So go on. Talk some sense to me.”

“What should I tell you? That you’re off the deep end? You blew us up, Alexander, you told everyone a story that wasn’t just yours to tell, and you threw your career in the toilet and nearly took mine with it. If you want some sort of sense in your life, you might consider skipping some steps and getting right to the part where you start making amends. It’s long past time.”

Alex blinks. “I said I was sorry. I said it then.”

“You did,” Thomas agrees. “Did you mean it, though?”

“I punched some asshole in a bar tonight. For you. Because he was saying awful things about us. About you. I did that for you. Because I meant it.”

Thomas shakes his head, closes the distance between them, and takes Alex’s hand. He raises it to eye level. “You did this for _you_ ,” he says. “And it hurts, doesn’t it? So you came to me because you want me to make it not hurt so bad but I don’t know what to tell you, Alex. Everything hurts when you pull the pin on a grenade and then don’t let go. Let it hurt.” He drops Alex’s hand, steps back, looking somewhere in the realm of Alex’s left shoulder rather than directly at him.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” Alex whispers after a moment’s silence. He knows that Thomas knows he doesn’t mean tonight, at the bar. They both know he means a year ago, when the hazy, lovely and altogether secret paradise they’d been living in was broken open, just a hair, when a certain tabloid media personality had suggested in a speculative one-paragraph article that their relationship was more than friendly. And then it was shattered when Alexander had panicked. Seizing on what felt internally like a moment of bravery and externally like pure terror, he himself had gone to the press without consulting Thomas first, had outed them both, had said that yes, they were together, and yes, he was proud of it.

But as it turns out, an immigrant island boy will be ousted from politics, shunned when he is seen to have corrupted the South’s favorite son. As it turns out, 2017 can feel a lot like 1817 where republicans are concerned, when #yasssqueen is a hashtag and yet the world is still not ready for two queer men making policy together and then going home and sleeping together. Oh, what a fucking scandal. In one fell swoop, their relationship had crumbled, Alexander’s career was gone so fast it was like it had never existed, and Thomas’s only hung on by a thread because he kept his head down and said nothing, confirmed or denied nothing, pulled out green money and purple royalty and pretended he was what he was raised to be. 

“You shouldn’t have done _that_ ,” Thomas says finally.

Alex scoffs. “Must be easy when you can fake like you were just humoring the office queer.” 

“Oh, fuck off,” Thomas snaps. “The press made their own assumptions.”

“You didn’t correct them, did you?” Alex asks, and yes, _now_ he feels like arguing, mostly because they haven’t yet had this fight. The split came so quickly that they never had time, and the tension’s been hanging in the air for a year, just waiting for the right moment to suffocate them until it hurts so much that they have to have it out.   
  
“Well, gee, I suppose I should have done it your way and told them all the truth myself then,” Thomas says, and his eyeroll isn’t really needed because Alex can hear one in his voice. 

“Alright, I jumped the gun,” Alex admits. “But how can you fault me for trying to make it our story before they could make it theirs?”  
  
“Nobody was asking, Alexander! Christ, it was one hack reporter’s rumor.” He sounds exhausted. “And I understand the impulse to head it off, I really do, but the least you could have done was ask if I was ready. You act like you’ve never been south of this city. Ask yourself if your average Virginian wants to know that I’m fucking a man, let alone a Democrat, let alone an immigrant. Could hear ‘em all loading their damn guns from here.”

There’s a ringing silence after these words, where Thomas seems to realize what he’s said and how it sounds, and where Alex comes to grips with the knowledge he thinks he’s always had: that way deep down inside him, Thomas has never left Monticello, that he’s reluctant to when it means he could suffer for it. 

“Okay, so I’m good enough to sleep with but not good enough to fight against some shitty hardline conservatives for?” Alex sneers. “I mean, give me some credit, I’m still the best fuck you ever had. Surely that’s earned me a little more of your loyalty than that.”

Thomas walks away from him, drags a chair out from the table in the dim kitchen, and sits down heavily. “Stop it. Just stop it. You were never just some quick fuck and you know it. You always want so badly to fight and you’re the only person you ever seem to lose to. Why is that? Nobody was saying anything true until you gave it validity and made it true. And I never treated you like less than the absolutely stupid fucking treasure that you are, but here you are putting words in my mouth anyway.”

Alex follows, leans on the table and his voice is a half-hiss, angry and sad. “A tree falling in the woods still makes a sound even if no one’s there to hear it. We were still together even if nobody knew. You left me out there to drown by myself! Maybe a rumor doesn’t make you lose sleep, but you come from enough money that it doesn’t have to. What people believe of you is not what they believe of me. Rumors about poor immigrant politicians are true until proven otherwise, and then still true after that. And how could I have proven otherwise? Jesus, Thomas. A blind man could have seen the way I looked at you. What was I supposed to do, deny that you hung the damn moon for me and the galaxy along with it?”

Thomas blinks, buries his face against his hand for a long time, then sighs, heavy and exhausted. “You do have a shit pokerface,” he admits finally, looking up at Alex with something like remorse.  
  
And Alex, who hates how desperate he feels, seizes on this in hopes of getting Thomas to own his own bullshit, or maybe just because misery loves company and Alex has been so goddamn _lonely._ “You want me to make amends?” he asks. “Fine. But can we both just take responsibility and say _we_ fucked up?” 

And finally, _finally_ , Thomas takes some accountability. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. I fucked up, too. We fucked up. God help us, Alexander, how are we in politics if we can’t even navigate a breakup like normal people?”

Alex pulls out a chair from the table, and sits across from Thomas, conscious of his clothes dripping water onto the tile floor. “To be fair,” he says, a little wounded, a lot defeated, “I’m not in politics anymore.”

“I’ve been reading your articles,” Thomas says, guiltily, after a very pregnant pause. “They’re perfect. Of course they are. You were meant to be a writer more than a politician, anyway.”

Alex isn’t sure whether or not to thank him. It’s a compliment, but his quiet little writing career feels like a poor substitute for the political career he’d once had. He was only just finding his stride, just about hitting the high note, and then he’d blown it up. And Thomas had gone and let him, then left him to face the music by himself.

And Alex knows now why he’s really here. What he really wants is for the blood on his knuckles to mean something. He wants it to mean a second chance, or at least a moment of clarity, something like forgiveness. Something like making up, and that’s a lot to put on some asshole’s busted lip, but there it is. 

“Kiss me,” he says into the sudden quiet of the kitchen, not quite sure if it’s an invitation or a demand. He doesn’t have the right to either. 

“Why?” Thomas asks. “It’s not going to fix anything.”

“One for the road,” Alex tells Thomas. _I’ll take my consolation prize and go_ , he thinks. 

But Thomas stands anyway, moves around the table, and pulls Alex to his feet. “Maybe pick a road less full of potholes?” 

And then his lips are on Alex’s, warm, a comfort as they’ve always been, and Thomas means it to be chaste, Alex can feel that in the way he’s keeping his lips firmly together as if this were seventh grade and the bottle’s landed on the wrong person but those are the rules of the game. But it goes a second too long to be one for the road, then a second too long for forgiveness, then ten seconds too long after that. It goes until Thomas’s lips part, until Alex can taste the evening coffee on his tongue, until they’re breathing too hard and have to pull away. 

“You’re a goddamn menace, you know that?” Thomas groans, almost bitterly, and there go his hands, unbuttoning Alex’s dampened shirt, roaming along his chest, and it feels different and the same, deliberate and unintentional at the same time. “You come here after I’ve only just remembered how to breathe without you and what am I supposed to do?” 

“You could stop undressing me,” Alex suggests, both pointedly and with hesitation, because who would want that?

“I could,” Thomas agrees, but he doesn’t. “I could send you home, and I could lie in bed and fuck my fist and think of you for all the good that’ll do me, or I could fuck you right here on my kitchen table and we’ll both be happier for it.”  
  
“Will we?” Alex asks, as if he doesn’t already know the answer, and Thomas shoves a hand down into Alex’s jeans, grips his cock, all need, no tease. 

“I will. Won’t you?”

“Fuck yes,” Alex breathes out. The old fire sparks to life, or maybe it had never gone out in the first place. Thomas’s touch is the kind of thing one doesn’t simply forget, and even after their time apart, it’s still built right into Alex, muscle memory. His body reacts to it like Thomas is simply hitting the right buttons for the ultimate cheat code, and god, yes, hasn’t he always been a fucking winner?

Alex pulls Thomas back into another kiss, and this one is filthier, the kind of kiss that used to get him into trouble when they had somewhere to be and Alex would steal one, promising something he didn’t have the time to follow through on. But he intends to follow through now, because there won’t be another chance, and maybe because he owes it to Thomas to make up for all the shit he’s caused. Maybe because Thomas owes it to him, too, just one more time. But this isn’t make-up sex, not really. This is something different entirely. A goodbye, or a hello, or something else there isn’t yet a word for.

Thomas’s hands are desperate, punishing, one of them pinching Alex’s nipples between his fingers, the other stroking him quick, tight, hard, needy. Alex moans into Thomas’s lips, pulls back to gasp for air. He’s been suffocating for over a year, and he’s suffocating still, but he’d happily die right here, letting Thomas fuck him up just like the first time. 

That first time was to be the only time, or so claimed Thomas, who said he only wanted to fuck Alex into shutting up for once, _just for once would you please shut up?_ But once had turned to twice, twice into the twentieth time, until one day Alex came over and just never left. But that had been before, before someone had looked at them and guessed, or known, and Alex had gone to the mat to fight for the legitimacy of their relationship when Thomas would rather have just kept the world guessing forever.

“Please,” Alex says now, because whatever else has happened today, a year ago, there’s no chance he’ll ever be able to say no to this. His hands move to his jeans, unzipping and unbuttoning them to give Thomas better access, to give himself _more_ because god knows he needs it, god knows he’s been craving it even if he wouldn’t admit it before tonight. He holds himself up on the edge of the kitchen table, legs already going weak, eyelids fluttering.

Alex allows himself to be lifted up, settled onto the table, and Thomas is wearing a stupid grin now, the same shit-eating grin as always that says he likes doing this, likes making Alex go weak beneath his touch, and maybe that he’s missed it just a little, too. 

He pulls his hand free of Alex’s boxers, says, “Up,” pushing against his thigh, and Alex lifts his hips. Thomas tugs at his jeans, wet from the rain, then his boxers, wet from something else, until Alex is laid half-naked before him, shirt hanging open, pants around his knees. Thomas hardly hesitates. He takes Alex into his mouth in one easy move. 

Alex relaxes back onto his elbows, and it’s so easy to fall back into the familiar rhythms of this, one hand moving to Thomas’s hair, tugging playfully at his curls, gently rocking his hips up against Thomas’s face with a moan. Jokes had followed Alex his whole life about his big, loud mouth, but in truth, it was always Thomas whose mouth did things that should have been classed as downright criminal. Thomas hums around the length of him and Alex is already panting, breathless, too needy. It feels like both forever and no time at all has passed since the last time, with Thomas’s hands teasing at his inner thighs, the bare edge of his nails on sensitive skin making Alex tremble. 

“Always so good,” Alex gasps, and Thomas tips his head up just a little until the head of Alex’s cock runs across the roof of his mouth. Thomas meets his eyes just for a second and it’s so much, the sight of him, one Alex had assumed he rightfully wouldn’t ever see again. But then Thomas returns his focus to Alex’s cock, gripping the base, licking all the way up the underside before swallowing him down again, lips stretched around the thickness of him. It’d be so easy for Alex to come just like this, fucking the back of Thomas’s throat raw, but he thinks that’s not what either of them want, not just now. 

Thomas must be reading Alex’s mind, because he pulls back then, kisses his way up Alex’s stomach, his chest, until he reaches his neck where he nips with his teeth. Alex knows there’ll be a mark in the morning, more than one, something to remember this by when it’s all over, and he lies back on the table, lets Thomas suck and kiss and bite him until he’s squirming under his lips. 

“You gonna fuck me?” Alex whispers, and Thomas’s mouth presses against his ear then.

“Yes,” he replies, unwavering. “Better than you ever remember it being.”

And then he’s pulling away, disappearing into the livingroom for a moment, leaving Alex breathing heavy, missing his touch all over again. He comes back with lube, and Alex tries not to think about how many people he’s had here in the last year, how many men he’s fucked over the end of the couch, on the floor by the fireplace. All the places that, once upon a time, had only been meant for the two of them. He pushes the thought away, pretends instead, _hopes_ instead that Thomas hasn’t been bringing people here, because if he had, that would mean he’d left Alex out in the cold to face the mess he’d created while pursuing exactly the thing that had caused so much trouble for him, for them, in the first place. And Alex isn’t willing to stomach that. 

Thomas finally yanks Alex’s jeans all the way off, then hikes one of Alex’s legs around his waist, pulling him close to the edge of the table. His hand drifts between them, and then there are his fingers, wet and cold, pressing inside, teasing Alex open and leaving him whining. “Christ, Thomas…”

“Forgot how much you always loved this,” Thomas says, but his eyes say that he hadn’t ever forgotten it, the way he could press just two, three fingers inside Alex and ruin him, easy as anything. His fingers are long, longer than they’ve got any right to be, and it’s only a second or two before they’re in deep enough to make Alex outright wail, stroking over his prostate, insistent, determined. Yes, Alex has always loved this, used to relish the way sometimes, in the too-early morning, Thomas would go from snuggling him in one moment to pushing his fingers inside him the next.   
  
“I love it,” Alex agrees after a moment, his voice gone hoarse. “But I need more. I need you.”

Thomas leans in, seeking a kiss, and Alex gives it up too easy. “Say it again,” he murmurs against Alex’s mouth.  
  
“Need you,” Alex repeats, and god help him if he doesn’t have to swallow a lump back down in his throat. “Always have.” 

_Always will,_ he thinks. 

And then Thomas’s mouth is gone as he pulls away, and his hand, but Alex doesn’t have time to mourn the loss before Thomas replaces it with his cock, and when had he gone and gotten his jeans open, slicked himself up without Alex even noticing? He supposes it doesn’t matter, that just like every other time, Thomas is always just fucking ready to do this, ready for him. He’s still fully clothed, for Christ’s sake, and apparently just like a Boy Scout, always prepared.

The first push is harder than Alex thinks it needs to be, Thomas’s hips not-quite-slamming into him before he stops for a minute to catch his breath already. He can’t tell if Thomas is just eager or maybe still a little angry. Nevertheless, Alex can feel himself opening to Thomas, wraps his legs around Thomas’s waist tighter before rolling his hips up off the table in an attempt to take him deeper. 

By all rights, it shouldn’t be so effortless. It’s been a long, long time since Thomas, since anyone, but Alex doesn’t mind the twinge of discomfort, not alongside the heat, the fullness, the connectedness. So he rocks back against Thomas, begging only with his eyes, and Thomas gives him what he wants. The kitchen table shifts just a little with the weight of them, the force of Thomas’s thrusts, and Alex thanks the gods for sturdy, Amish-constructed furniture. Not the imagined use of the Amish, he thinks, but it serves his and Thomas’s purposes at the present moment. Something, at least, is being dined on on this table, even if it’s him. 

Thomas leans in now, buries his face against Alex’s neck, mouths at his collarbone, makes noises so fucking hot that Alex finds himself closer than he imagined he’d be five minutes into this. They used to go for hours, the two of them, used to spend weekends in bed, each moving into the other just like this. But now there’s only desperation, a neediness aching to be satisfied, and there’s no way it’s going to last.  
  
“I missed you,” Thomas admits suddenly, voice raspy, one of his hands moving to Alex’s hip, the other finding Alex’s hand, holding tight.

Fuck. _Fuck._ Alex clings to his hand, wraps his free arm around Thomas’s neck, holds him close as he rocks into him again and again and again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he says back, and it occurs to him that all he wants now is Thomas’s forgiveness. That’s all he’s ever wanted, and even if he didn’t know it, it’s what he wanted when he’d thrown his hand against some stupid loudmouth’s face in that bar earlier. How dare anyone talk about Thomas, about them, about what they didn’t and had never understood? How dare they when Alex had barely been able to talk about it without cracking open at the barely healed seams of the wound in his too-soft fucking heart? 

“I’m sorry,” Thomas repeats, claiming his mouth again, murmuring between kisses, “I love you, don’t you go away from me again.”

Alex closes his eyes, hit with the force of Thomas’s words, with a memory from the night this had all come crashing down when Thomas, angry as a storm, had turned to leave, a threat on his tongue that Alex had better be gone when he got back. _Don’t go_ , Alex had called after him, but the door had already shut, and Alex had been left to curl up inside himself. He doesn’t think he’s crawled back out since. Not until now, anyway. 

Alex wants to make promises again, say things he maybe shouldn’t, ask Thomas to try again to push past the hallowed halls of his stupid Southern upbringing and just let them be what they are. Public or private, it doesn’t matter anymore, all Alex knows is that he can’t live without this, without Thomas, not anymore. He doesn’t know how to express all this, not between the pressure of Thomas inside him, the fireworks lighting up deep down in his belly, Thomas’s lips kissing over his neck, his face, his hair. Intead, Alex just says, “I love you,” the words bubbling up from the place he’d buried them, again and again, his bruised and bloodied hand cupping Thomas’s face. “I love you, I love you, I --”

The fireworks go off. Thomas collapses into him with a strangled sound, and that’s all Alex has ever needed, weak for him as he is. He comes too, seconds later between their bodies, writhing back against Thomas, riding out the unexpected wave, breathless and wrecked.   
  
It’s a long time before Alex is able to come back down, before Thomas is able to pull free of him, and Alex thinks he hears Thomas mutter something about the state of his kitchen. He can’t help but laugh, throwing his arm over his face, suddenly unable to contain himself. When he looks at Thomas again, he bites back another wave of laughter at the look on his face. 

“Fucking menace,” Thomas tells him once again, but then he’s pulling Alex up until he’s sitting on the edge of the table, steps forward to curl his arms around him, to kiss him all gentle and too-sweet. 

When he finally pulls back, Alex says into the quiet of the kitchen, “Did you mean it?”  
  
“Yeah, Alexander,” Thomas says, and he sighs, the sound a little exasperated, a lot relieved. “Yeah, I meant what I said. Please don’t go.”

“I never wanted to,” Alex tells him honestly.

“I know.” Thomas’s hand finds his again. He slides his fingers in between Alex’s and doesn’t let go. 

“I have one condition on which I’ll stay,” Alex says, and he thinks Thomas knows he’s half-lying, that he’d stay one way or the other. Still, he presses on, says, “Don’t let me keep drowning out there by myself. You don’t have to do what I did. But don’t let all of their asinine ideas of us shake you up like that. Not again.”

Thomas leans in, presses his forehead against Alex’s. “I wish you would stop seeing me when I’m trying to be goddamn invisible,” he says, laying a kiss, then two, then three against the corner of Alex’s mouth. “This isn’t going to be easy.”

“When was it ever?” Alex snakes his arms around Thomas’s waist, shaking his head. “You used to hate me, remember?” 

“Hate you?” Thomas says, smiling now. “Never. That loud little mouth, though…”

And Alex pushes him away, rolling his eyes. “Go get in the shower,” he says. “Maybe I’ll come join you and you can show me how much you hate my loud little mouth.”

And Thomas walks away. This time, Alex is okay with watching him go.


End file.
